Customers demand more of the products and services they use than ever before. They insist that the companies they deal with on a regular basis provide them greater and greater levels of convenience. One specific example of this increasing convenience is the use of automated and remote systems for the purposes of paying bills.
Customers desiring to avoid the hassle with purchasing stamps and writing physical checks for the number of bills they get on a regular basis have welcomed the adoption of bill pay services by the financial institutions they do business at. However, the bill pay systems may be constrained by one of two factors. The first being the awareness that multiple systems need to be accessed to enable money to be transferred from one system to another.
Two systems are in place that standardize the act of transferring money from one system, Automated Clearing House (ACH) and wire transfers. ACH transactions are simply, though not exactly, described as electronic checks in that they are processed like a check without the physical writing of a check. Wire transfers are generally known from their use in movies and television shows where a large sum of money is transferred from one bank to another while the villain waits patiently for the confirmation of the transfer. The first uses the Federal Reserve Bank, as a physical check does, for the clearing of the funds to cover the transaction. The latter uses a robust system of error-checking and recovery to ensure that the money is transferred properly. However, either one of these systems require interaction with many disparate systems. This problem is also present when all the systems are owned and operated by the same entity because of continuous upgrades and deployment of systems.